“We think we’ve got some good data, and we’re pretty sure it’s valuable. We just don’t know what to DO with it.”

It’s a fair thing to say. That’s partly because there aren’t a ton of people in the wine industry who work with data, so talking about it (and familiarity with it) is far from common. It’s a fair thing to say, also, because each situation has a lot of moving parts – your data will be different than another company’s data and you will each need it to do different things in order to be useful for achieving your company’s individual goals.

So I’d like to spend a few moments in this space to share some stories of Data Heroes. They’re the people who defined a goal, accessed the right data sets, and asked the right questions of that data in order to derive the most useful insights that they could put into practice to achieve that goal.

Today’s Data Hero comes from the entertainment industry, where the production company behind the Godzilla movie used data to evaluate everything from the trailer to cast selection to the release date. The company is called Legendary Pictures and their analytics office is based in Boston, far away from Hollywood groupthink.

Here’s an important takeaway from the Godzilla case study: Legendary used the data before they filmed and launched the movie, so that they could be as confident as possible in its success. Much of the work we see with data in the wine industry comes after the fact, but that’s the difference between reactive or diagnostic analytics (when we look at what happened) and prescriptive analytics (when we look at what we can make happen).

Here are some additional takeaways from a Data Hero that took the prescriptive analytics approach:

Legendary combined both new and traditional data sources, such as social media engagement and hourly box office figures.

Legendary learned to spend fewer marketing dollars on hard core fans and more on “persuadable people.”

They used data to identify those “persuadable people” and, more importantly, they segmented those people into precisely defined cohorts and communicated messages targeted precisely to them. Cohorts consisted of as few as four people each.

Legendary engaged and listened to their audience, and crafted the movie’s trailer to align with the audience’s interests. In practical terms, that meant the trailer focused more on the leading actor and conspiracy theories (which the audience loved) and less on the monster and destruction (which the audience did not love).

The transfer of each of these takeaways to applications in the wine world is not only possible. It’s the way forward, and it's the shape of the model that Enolytics is building. Combining new and traditional data sources. Allotting marketing spend to “persuadable people." Defining precisely who those persuadable people are. And crafting communications specifically to them.

Do you know of some Data Hero cases in the wine industry? Please share them in the comments section or with us directly via email at cathy@enolytics.com.